Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [79]
Ron Barber, Gabby’s district director, once got into a philosophical discussion with her about the meaning of life. Why are all of us brought into the world? Why do we exist? They went back and forth on the question, and then Gabby finally said, “I think it comes down to this: We are here to care for each other.”
To that end, Gabby was also a diligent thank-you-note writer. She’d typically write or sign five hundred a week. On the plane, at the kitchen table, in the car, she’d have a giant stack of paper in front of her. Each one would have a personal note scribbled at the bottom. To me, it seemed as if she remembered something about everyone. She sent many thank-you e-mails and notes to her thirty-five staffers and interns, too. She was loyal to them and they were loyal to her.
Some staffers felt that Gabby was a perfectionist. It wasn’t easy for them when they had to wait longer than they liked for her authorization to send a press release or schedule a meeting. She also had a policy that if a constituent from Arizona was visiting Washington and stopped by the office, unless it was impossible, she wanted to see them. That included kids on school trips. She met with a couple hundred to a couple thousand constituents each month in her office, and she wasn’t good at moving on. She’d be chatting away and her staff had to point at their watches or wave their arms to let her know she was throwing off the whole day’s schedule.
Gabby’s staffers came to understand that she was motivated by an urge to do it all. And she stayed so busy in part because she had a mantra: “Nothing can replace firsthand knowledge of an issue. To understand something, you have to see it.” So, unlike a lot of Arizona politicians, she toured long stretches of the U.S.-Mexican border. She even went to places that are accessible only by mules because the terrain there is too rocky for horses. (Mules are more stable, and better at making their way through creek beds.)
A couple times, Gabby took me with her on border visits. We stayed at the home of Warner and Wendy Glenn, whom Gabby visited so often that they’d become close friends. Warner is a seventy-something rancher and mountain-lion hunter. This guy is the definition of tough; he makes Clint Eastwood look like Lady Gaga.
Warner and his daughter Kelly took Gabby and me out to the border for hours, and we’d see illegal immigrants waiting on the Mexican side to make their crossings. I waved at them and said “Hola,” but Gabby, as a representative of the U.S. government, didn’t think it appropriate to engage in conversation with people preparing to enter the country illegally.
At one point I got off my mule, tied it up, and told Gabby I was going to become an illegal immigrant to Mexico. “Don’t do that!” she said. But I went under the pathetic barbed-wire fence and strolled about a hundred yards into Mexican territory, then came back into the United States, just to test how easy it is.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Gabby told me when I returned. But I think she was glad I now had a sense of how porous our border is. In her district alone, hundreds of people a day are caught trying to cross. It’s hard to say how many get through. In some spots, the border is nothing more than a couple pieces of barbed wire.
When President Obama spoke about fixing the immigration system in 2010, Gabby issued a tough statement. “Arizonans have heard it all before,” she said. “We listen closely to speeches and then wait for Washington to act. We’re tired of waiting. The crisis on America’s borders won’t be addressed with words. . . . Today we have two border problems: security and reform of our broken immigration laws. I reject the call by some that we must focus exclusively on one without addressing the other. We are a smart country. We can multitask. We can and we must address both of these